Jan 13, 2016
I accidentally began research for this article about 2.5 years ago, when passing through Chicago on the long drive home from a summer in Canada. There was a gathering of Mustachians downtown and we kept a pub and eventually the neighboring Falafel place open late. One of the group was a young attorney in a prestigious law…
In my half of the Earth, we’ve recently drifted past the Winter Solstice – the shortest, darkest, day of the year and usually one of the coldest too. Some might consider this a depressing time, but for me it is cause for optimism. After all, if life is already this great right now, can you…
Whenever something unusually interesting in the field of personal finance shows up in the news, Mr. Money Mustache hears about it. Our diligent network of Mustachian Volunteer Spies combs and filters the world’s information, both for pearls of wisdom and pellets of comically misinformed dung. Although I take steps to remain on a low-information diet,…
If you were to show up and gaze down on our planet as an outsider, you could easily get the impression that Dogs run the place, and we Humans exist only to serve their needs. We provide them with shelter, transportation, medical care and even grooming, in most cases going further into personal debt to…
Four years into writing this blog, I thought I had seen almost everything when it comes to the most common financial suicides committed by the middle class. But today I was hit in the head by a shocking realization: When choosing between buying versus renting a house or apartment, people are making much, much worse choices…
Dear Mr. Money Mustache, I just came across your blog a few weeks ago after seeing a story about it on ABC. While the idea of cutting back my lifestyle sounded horrible at first, once I dug in I saw what you were really talking about and it has been like a giant boxing glove…
Almost two years ago, I started getting reader emails asking me if student loan refinancing was a good idea, and if a company called SoFi was a good place to do it. Never having carried such a loan myself I wasn’t sure if I was qualified to answer, but other emails were coming in reporting…
We’re about four years into this blog, and at this point I finally have to admit I am a complete and total fraud. I mean sure, I saved enough to retire in just nine years and have had a great time running around like a free man in this subsequent decade. But that was an isolated incident,…
Working in my yard the other day, I happened to notice that my power meter is just about to cross the ‘2000’ mark. That’s two thousand kilowatt hours, or roughly $200 of electricity. About the amount it takes to drive your Tesla Model S from Los Angeles to New York and back, or dry 570…
Every day, the ever-generous Google search engine sends thousands of random new people from around the world to the shores of our Mustachian Nation here. Do they find what they are looking for? Just for fun, let’s take a rapid-fire tour through the top questions people have asked the Internet over the course of the last…
One whole year ago, I was in the depths of destroying and rebuilding a sagging 1950s brick ranch house, which has since grown up to become our actual home. Looking back through Google Plus’s automatic archive of my phone pictures, I can see the “kitchen” was still open to the great outdoors on that date: Despite…
For a little over ten years, I have been contributing to an automated stock investing account, choosing Betterment out of a large and growing field of companies (affectionately referred to as Robo Advisers) that offer similar services. See Article: Why I Put My Last $100,000 into Betterment On this page, I’ll keep you up to…
Today’s case study is a classic, because it addresses a problem suffered by tens of millions of families: the chronic time shortage caused by a double income, double commute, kid-raising lifestyle. While some practitioners of this game do it by choice, many other would rather have more free time … if only they could afford…
A few months back, I joined in for an episode of a podcast called the Disciplined Investor. The host Andrew Horowitz and I were chatting about money, raising children, stock market crashes and so on, and then this question popped out of the void and really surprised me: For some reason, the question…
Unfortunately for me, one of the concepts I find most annoying to read about happens to be one of those the mainstream financial media likes to write about the most: The hard times that have befallen Hardworking Americans*, and how it is entirely the fault of the system in which we are all stuck. Depending on…
I’ve always been a do-it-yourself investor. This habit started around age 19 with a series of ridiculous speculative trades in individual high-tech company stocks. “This stock is sure to go through the roof”, I would think, “because their products are so great.” This is a terrible way to invest. But after a few early financial…
